Increasingly enterprises are relying on information collected from customers and suppliers to run their organizations more efficiently. More and more types of information from a variety of sources are being collected and housed in enterprise data warehouses. The information is then mined from a variety of automated and manual sources for purposes of running the organization more efficiently and creating improved relationships with the customers of the enterprise.
Retailers expend a lot of human assets, physical assets, and cash in maintaining and operating their data environments. Access to their data warehouses is closely guarded, since it is viewed as the lifeblood of the organizations. In fact, retailers spend a lot of money in hiring individuals to protect, maintain, and mine their data ware houses, and such individuals are not cheap by any means.
However, by closing out access to the data warehouse many potential ideas and improvements are lost by retailers. That is, many partners of a retailer, such as manufacturers or distributers of goods or services who also have a vested interest in maintaining customer loyalty and increasing the sales of their goods and services, lack access to critical information that may be useful to both the retailers and the vendors. Moreover, vendors would be willing to expend their own resources to utilize the information housed in a retailer's data warehouse, if access to the data warehouse was permitted by that retailer.
Yet, providing access can be problematic for a retailer because it includes vital competitive information of the retailer and could also expose some vendors to a loss of competitive information to another vendor having access to the data warehouse. Moreover, some agreements between a retailer and its vendors may actually prohibit the distribution of competitive information about customers to competitors of the vendors.
So, the answer is not as simple as merely providing vendors access to a retailer's data warehouse and in fact extending access to vendors is a far more complex situation. As a result, vendors generally do not have access to a retailer's data warehouse or to tools of that data warehouse.